This image is presented in the exhibition Unruly Archives, curated by Amin Alsaden. The exhibition brings together artists whose work employs archival traces to underscore the global footprint of war and organized violence, and speak to dimensions of conflict that are usually overlooked or deliberately suppressed. As such, the images challenge the correlation between conflict and specific regions, particularly South West Asia and North Africa, while highlighting international complicity through a history of colonialism as well as recent political meddling and military interventions. Organized violence destroys not only human beings and their environments, but also has a lasting, traumatic, and often invisible impact that brings to the fore questions of memory, representation, culture, nationhood, and belonging.

Ali Eyal’s work explores the relationships between the way catastrophes are remembered, and the identity and politics of Iraq and the Arab world (for which he uses the metaphor “Small Farm”), particularly after the 2003 American-led invasion. In the bloody aftermath of the invasion, Eyal lost his father and several uncles, who disappeared in 2006, leaving behind only a photograph of a firebombed Daewoo Prince. The car could have been destroyed by the American military, private security contractors (such as Blackwater), or other foreign forces. At the centre of the work presented here is this photograph, the content of which is denied to viewers, who can only access the inscription on the back. But the photograph is seen as one of numerous layers, composed of sketches, albums, and open folders (implying an unresolved case), and the artist does not reveal whether these point to real or imagined objects and events. The work raises questions about the impossibility of reconciling attempts to document or remember with the vast scale of the tragedies brought about by conflict—which often escape the frames into which one might wish to inscribe their multiple, and often inconceivable, dimensions.

The following is the translation of the Arabic text that appears in the image: “This is a photograph of my father’s car which was burned by the American forces, umm wait, I have to change the accents and angles of my letters. This photograph was taken by our lawyer and my father’s relative Salah Al-Ghrairi, who was murdered, due to his work with the Farm government, by Al-Qaeda at the doorsteps of the court building. We headed out with the lawyer, I and my mother, when I was thirteen years old, and went to the American Military base near our house in Al-Rashid. I will never forget how the American soldier yelled in my mother’s face: ‘We have nothing to do with that! It could have been Blackwater or the Dutch Forces. Now get out! We don’t compensate terrorists.’ I left with my mother and the lawyer devastated and heartbroken. The size of the photograph’s back is not enough for my letters. Memory from 2007.”